The battle to become America's Next Top Embedded Video-Sharing Service has taken a turn for the litigious. When NBC Universal and News Corp. embarked on a partnership to build the "YouTube Killer," a name "was not a priority." But five months into the venture, and after "Google executives started referring to the venture as the 'Clown Company,' they announced their baby's name: Hulu.
As far as names go, "Hulu" is pretty much in keeping with the Web-naming traditions established by outfits such as "Yahoo," "Google," "YouTube," "Meebo," "Ooma," and "Valleywag," which dictates that the best names come from either the utterances of infants or persons who have just been brutally whanged on the head with a blunt instrument. (We remind you, of course, that "HuffPo" is a colloquial abbreviation of "The Huffington Post.") As chief executive Jason Kilar elaborates, Hulu is ""short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce and rhymes with itself...Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name."
Elsewhere, however, not everyone was sharing in the inherent fun:
But a tiny company in North Carolina was not laughing. The firm, an Internet publisher called Lulu, saw Hulu as a blatant attempt to trample on its good name. Lulu Enterprises filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Hulu on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Raleigh.In the lawsuit, Lulu's founder, Bob Young, accused the media giants of unfair competition and cyberpiracy. "Widespread consumer confusion will occur and Lulu will be irreparably harmed," Mr. Young said in the complaint.
As bitter as this feud may be, the New York Times notes that both companies are benefitting from the attention their acrimony is soliciting. Sounds pretty Web 2.0 to us!
Fun Fact: From NYT--"hulu" means "cease and desist" in Swahili.
Not-As-Fun Fact: The last time two opponents with adorable names became embroiled in a bitter dispute was, of course, the Rwandan Genocide!
Related:You Say Hulu. I Say Lulu. Let's Take the Thing to Court [New York Times]